Lee Child - Night School

It arrived at seven-thirty in the shape of two mid-grade executive officers from the National Security Council. Personally known by Sinclair, she said on an introductory call, and trusted by her, presumably. They were both men, both in their thirties, both dour, as if worn down by the data they handled. By eight o’clock they were up and running, with secure phone lines established, and Reacher got in ahead of Waterman and White with his staffing request, and by nine Neagley was in the house, early enough to be already ordering up storms of information through the NSC before Waterman’s help even got there, who was then followed twenty minutes later by White’s. Both new arrivals were men. They looked like younger versions of their bosses. Waterman’s guy was called Landry, and White’s was called Vanderbilt, no relation to the rich guy from history.

They hauled furniture from place to place, and set up a three-way joint control center in the classroom, run by Neagley and Landry and Vanderbilt. The NSC babysitters were kept in the office, and Reacher and Waterman and White took conference calls at the table, in the leather chairs. By eleven o’clock the place was humming. By twelve o’clock it had some data. Sinclair called in on the speaker to hear all about it.

Reacher said, “That day there were nearly two hundred thousand American citizens in Germany. About sixty thousand actively deployed military, plus nearly double that in families and recent retirees not gone home yet, plus about a thousand civilians on vacation, plus about five thousand more at trade conventions and board meetings.”

“That’s a lot of Americans.”

Reacher said, “We should go to Hamburg.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Why now?”

“We’ll have to go sometime. We can’t solve this on paper.”

Sinclair said, “Agent Waterman, what do you think?”

Waterman said, “What I think depends on how fast these messengers get back and forth. Sounds like a slow process. When will our guy expect an answer? What would be a typical interval?”

“Elsewhere it seems to be about two weeks. Maybe a day or so less.”

“We want to be nearby when the deal is done. No question about that. But we seem to have time. I would go to Hamburg next week. I would want more background analysis first. It might save some effort in the long run.”

“Mr. White?”

White said, “I would assume I’m not going to Hamburg at all. Who would need me there, alongside the manhunter and the assassin? Solving things on paper is what I’m all about. I leave the East Coast only when strictly necessary.”

Sinclair said, “Major Reacher, on what grounds do you want to go to Hamburg now?”

Reacher said, “On the grounds that Mr. Ratcliffe said we’d get anything we want.”

Sinclair said, “Would either Agent Waterman or Mr. White object if Major Reacher went to Hamburg on his own?”

White said, “No.”

Waterman said, “As long as he goes on a do-no-harm basis.”

–

One advantage of communicating through the West Wing was instantaneous success with airlines and hotels. Within thirty minutes Reacher and Neagley were booked non-stop that night on Lufthansa, and rooms were reserved for them at a Hamburg business hotel not far from the apartment in question, in the fashionable neighborhood Sinclair had described, reasonably central, pretty expensive.

They stayed in McLean the rest of the afternoon and worked on eliminating personnel by matching maneuver reports to names. A guy couldn’t be driving a tank on the eastern plains and walking around Hamburg at the same time. The number of possibles dropped like a stone. Which felt like progress. Then the first reports from the airlines about Zurich started to come in. White’s guy Vanderbilt seemed to get the point, and he volunteered to work late on the cross-check while they flew, and then to call them when they landed with anything of significance.

Cooperation school, Reacher thought. Who knew?

–

Neagley drove them to the airport in Reacher’s Caprice and parked in the short-term garage on the government’s dime. Her version of civilian dress was mirrored sunglasses and a battered leather jacket over a T-shirt, with pants Reacher took to be old Marine Corps leftovers like his own, but which turned out to be a genuine Ralph Lauren item. She had a bag, and he didn’t. Their seats were in coach, but were luxury items compared to the canvas slings on a military transport. They ate the food, reclined an inch, and went to sleep.

–

Twenty-four hours after the American left, the hooker’s apartment was much less fragrant than it had been before. Or more fragrant, to be accurate, but with the wrong scent. It was becoming noticeable, out in the corridor, and through the kitchen vents. Her neighbors, already resentful, called the cops in the middle of the night. The dispatcher sent a squad car for a look. Or a sniff, as it turned out. Which resulted in the super being roused, with a pass key. Which led to four hours of detectives, and questions, and caution tape, and crime scene technicians, and then finally an ambulance and a rubber body bag.

Good news and bad news, from the police point of view. Hamburg was a rowdy port city, with a world-famous red light district, and drugs and graffiti at the train station, but even so homicide was relatively rare. Less than one a week. A dead body was still an event. Careers could be built. And the police department claimed a success rate close to ninety percent. That was the good news. The bad news was the remaining unsolved ten percent was all either stabbed junkies or strangled prostitutes. Occupational hazards. Not likely to be one for the textbooks. The perpetrator was probably at sea already, in a bunk on a ship, a hundred miles away, heading for the open ocean.

–

Reacher and Neagley had West Wing cash in their pockets, for operational purposes, so they took a Mercedes taxi into town from the airport, through watery sunshine and morning traffic. The street with their hotel was quiet and leafy, full of buildings made of glass and pale foreign brick, and lined both sides with small but expensive cars. Their rooms were on the fourth floor, modestly elevated, with rooftop views. Hamburg was an ancient Hanseatic city, with more than a thousand years of history behind it, but none of the roofs Reacher could see was more than fifty years old. Germany had bombed Britain, and Britain had bombed back, and had gotten pretty good at it. In 1943 they had started a firestorm that all but wiped Hamburg out. Flames a thousand feet high, temperatures of a thousand degrees, the air on fire, the roads on fire, rivers and canals boiling. Forty thousand dead in one raid. Britain had lost sixty thousand in the whole war. They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind . Hosea, one of the twelve minor prophets, but dead on the money in that case.

The room phone rang. Neagley, arranging to meet for breakfast. Then it rang again. Vanderbilt, up late in McLean, Virginia, with the names of thirty-six Americans who had traveled from Hamburg to Zurich during the week in question. We’re going to catch all kinds of people, Reacher had said.

He went downstairs to the breakfast buffet, which was very European, with cured meats and smoked cheeses and exotic pastries. He sat with Neagley, at a table in a window. Nine o’clock in the morning, in Hamburg, Germany.

–

Nine o’clock in the morning in Hamburg, Germany, was half past twelve in the afternoon in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Lunch was being prepared in the kitchen of a white mud house. Outside was a hot desert climate, like Arizona. The messenger was waiting. He had arrived during the night, after four commercial airplanes and three hundred rough miles in a Toyota pick-up truck. He was given breakfast and shown to an antechamber. He had waited there before, many times. Back and forth, back and forth. Such was his life. He was the only man in the house without a beard or an AK47.